Robert E. Bush, an 18-year-old Navy medical corpsman during the Battle of Okinawa who was the youngest sailor to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II, died Nov. 8 at an assisted-living facility in Tumwater. He was 79 and had kidney cancer.
On May 2, 1945, Bush was serving with a rifle company in the 1st Marine Division and met resistance from Japanese forces in the Ryukyu Islands.
He darted among the artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire to care for the injured. While giving plasma to a fallen Marine lieutenant with a dire chest and shoulder injury, he refused to leave his exposed position on a ridge in the midst of a Japanese counterattack.
Bush held the plasma bottle aloft with one hand while he took the officer’s carbine with his free hand and fired at the charging Japanese. He reloaded his gun and maintained point-blank fire on approaching enemy soldiers, killing six at the cost of his right eye as hand grenades exploded around him.
Bush stayed with the lieutenant until the man was safely evacuated. He then collapsed while trying to walk to an aid station.
According to the military publication Stars and Stripes, Bush was one of 482 Navy corpsmen at Okinawa and one of six who received the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award for valor. A spokeswoman for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society said Bush was the youngest Navy recipient during the war.
“This medal wasn’t given to me because I’m the greatest guy who came down the pike,” he once said. “We had thousands who lost their lives who were certainly equally identifiable as being able, in their mind or the minds of their compadres, to receive the Medal of Honor. But perhaps it wasn’t properly documented. So I look at it as though I’m a custodian for those who died.”
Robert Eugene Bush, a logger’s son, was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Tacoma. His parents divorced when he was 4, and he was raised partly in the coastal town of Raymond. He lived with his mother, a nurse, in the basement rooms of the hospital where she worked.
The Washington Post
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